…and after that, out of all whooping!

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Monthly Archives: April 2014

After visiting Agecroft Hall, my friend and I drove on to Maymont. Like Agecroft Hall, Maymont is an estate that has been turned into an historic house museum. There are wildlife exhibits, a children’s farm, and beautiful formal gardens.

The entrance to the Italian Gardens is marked by a stone arch with the inscription “Via Florum.”

Via Florum

The daffodil display garden:

The entrance to the Japanese Garden:

Can you spot the three people in this image?

A bonus point if you spot the human being in this one…

I’m a sucker for turtles…

Moon Bridge

A dry pool.

To the right – an azumaya, or resting place

I love photographing people, but I generally try to avoid having them in photos of landscapes. On this day, however, the gardens were so bustling that it was impossible to avoid including them in the photos. Apart from the usual garden visitors, there were high schoolers posing in their prom outfits and a gathering of “LARPers,” (Live-action role-players) dressed in fanciful costumes and wigs. (Believe me, I was dying to take their photos, but I managed to restrain myself with great difficulty…). Looking back at the photos that include people I captured unintentionally, I love the effect. I think the people, dressed in clothing as colorful as the flowers themselves, add rather than detract from the scene.

Here are two garden poems that capture the idea of people as an integral part of a gardenscape:

Amy Lowell’s “Patterns” begins with this stanza:

I walk down the garden paths, And all the daffodils Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. I walk down the patterned garden paths In my stiff, brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jeweled fan, I too am a rare Pattern. As I wander down The garden paths.

And here are the beginning and final stanzas of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Design in Living Colors.” Perhaps she had Amy Lowell’s poem in mind when she wrote this?

Embroidered in a tapestry of green Among the textures of a threaded garden, The gesturing lady and her paladin Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden Upon the formal attitudes of trees By no wind bent, and birds without a tune, Against the background of a figured frieze In an eternal summer afternoon.

And the final stanza:

The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree, All images once separate and alone, Become the creatures of a tapestry Miraculously stirred and made our own. We are the denizens of a living wood Where insight blooms anew on every bough, And every flower emerges understood Out of a pattern unperceived till now.

This Saturday I was very happy to catch up with a dear friend, who moved from Charlottesville to Richmond years ago. Even though Richmond is just a little over an hour away, it’s just far enough and we are both so busy that we don’t get to see each other very often.

My friend took me to Agecroft Hall, a 15th century Tudor estate originally built in Lancashire, England. By 1925 the house had become the victim of industrialization and had fallen into disrepair. The last living heirs were forced to sell it at auction. Thomas C. Williams, Jr., a wealthy entrepreneur in Richmond, bought the house for $19,000 and had it dismantled, crated, and shipped across the Atlantic. Over the course of two years and at the cost of $250,000, he had it reassembled as his own personal estate in the Windsor Farms neighborhood, on a hillock overlooking the James River. Sadly, Williams died only one year after moving into the house of his dreams.

In honor of William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday this Saturday, Agecroft Hall hosted a “Bard’s Birthday Celebration” with singing, games, dancing, acrobatics, and other performances.

Virtue alone is invincible.

In the grassy lawn as you approach the house is a stone that bears the identical inscription that is on Shakespeare’s tombstone at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon:

Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blest be the man that spares these bones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.

The English gardens, designed by renowned landscape architect Charles Gillette, are a marvel. We caught the peak of tulip season:

The Knot Garden:

We were so taken with the lovely gardens, we decided to go on to Maymont…to be continued tomorrow.

Like this:

Here’s what happens when you have a sister who is super stylish and works in the hippest hotel in DC:

1) She scopes out the coolest places in LA to stay and visit during your weekend there. (See yesterday’s post)!

2) You show up at her house with your suitcase packed with an outfit you think is suitable for the wedding you’ll be going to with her. She makes you show her what you brought. She takes one look and shakes her head. She pulls out a much better dress, shoes, jewelry, and a bag from her own closet for you to wear.

3) She tries to help you out by taking a photo of you from a flattering angle…(from waaaaaaaay above)!

That’s me, my mama, and Sister #2

And here we are, my beloved sisters and me.

4) Your pot roast shaped feet overflow right out of your sister’s sleek shoes. In the end, unable to bear the crippling, excruciating pain, you take them off and end up walking around the country club with your fat, unshod, blistered, bright red feet. Because you’re just as effortlessly classy as your sister is stylish.

OUCH!

The wedding was in the stunning Mountain Gate Country Club in LA. The only thing more beautiful than the setting was the gorgeous couple:

One of the best things about a wedding is that you get to have a family reunion for the happiest of reasons.

I loved the art behind the reception desk. It’s the first line of this poem by American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), which also happens to be perfect for Earth Day:

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things – earth, stone and water. Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars – The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions, And unhuman nature its towering reality – For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock And water and sky are constant – to feel Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural Beauty, is the sole business of poetry. The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

Even more spectacular was The Penthouse, the restaurant in the nearby Huntley Hotel. We met up there for brunch on Saturday with a small portion of my very large family: